... 7 Last| Contents| Next Issue 52 Tittle-tattle Tom Easton BAP There was a nice little twist to be observed by followers of the British American Project when Home Office minister Baroness Scotland dashed to Washington this summer seeking to prevent the extradition of the NatWest Three, caught in the long shadow of Enron. The old friend of Tony and Cherie Blair was a young barrister when she was recruited to the Atlanticist freemasonry in 1987. BAP was not just a rite of passage for Baroness Scotland. She continues to serve on the UK advisory board with her old BBC pal James Naughtie and Mike Maclay, the man from Hakluyt. The small irony she may have pondered as she flew west ...

... rate policy to the bankers, and up went interest rates and the pound rose- albeit not as dramatically as it did in 1980/81. New Labour's economic policy is simply Thatcherism mark 1 without all the pseudoscience about the money supply. Because it has started from lower inflation than existed in 1980 the interest rate rises under Brown/Blair have not- yet- had to have been to be as savage as those of Thatcher/Howe in the early 1980s. Even Hugo Young has noticed that:'...the sounds of therapeutic Thatcherism, defending the industrial destruction of the early 1980s, begin uncomfortably to echo.'(3) The oddity is that Brown appears ...

... SIS had done it. Why would they bother? Like the rest of the UK foreign policy establishment, SIS were against the war. Kelly was of relatively little consequence: the war was going to happen no matter what anyone said. Had Kelly called a press conference and told the world everything he knew, he could have embarrassed the Blair government; but that's all. Second, if Kelly's death looked like an unlikely and/or incompetent way to commit suicide, it was an even more incompetent way to fake a suicide. Richard Webster, the author of the wonderful study of the paedophile panic centred round a children's' home in Wales, The Secret of Bryn Estyn ...

... but have one purpose and one purpose only: 'to 1 Lobster regulars might be familiar with McKnight's earlier book, Espionage and the Roots of the Cold War. give Murdoch a seat at the table of national politics in three English-speaking nations'. In Britain, the focus has always been on Murdoch's close relationship first with Thatcher and then with Blair and Brown. What McKnight brings out is the extent to which it is the United States that is the real object of Murdoch's affection. While he was very close to Thatcher, it was Reagan and Reaganism that 'were the most important influences on Rupert Murdoch's political world view'. This is an important corrective. Indeed, when Thatcher ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 33) Summer 1997 Last| Contents| Next Issue 33 The British American Project for the Successor Generation Tom Easton Let's start with the easiest question: what do George Robertson, Chris Smith and Marjorie 'Mo' Mowlam have in common? They are, of course, all strong Tony Blair supporters in the new Labour Cabinet. And what about Peter Mandelson and Elizabeth Symons? Not yet quite Cabinet members, but both are key figures in the 'modernising project' in Blair's 'New Labour' government: Mandelson as Minister without Portfolio having a roving brief to monitor, coordinate and brief the press on all areas of government activity and Symons, the former ...

... the Peter Wright allegations, he had run for cover when Mrs. Thatcher challenged his patriotism. His successor, John Smith, was a life-long friend of the SIS officer, now Baroness Ramsay, and Donald Dewar, I am informed, had a similar relationship with former MI5 D-G Stella Rimington.(1) The key people in the Blair faction are all securely integrated into the Anglo-American foreign policy system(2) and are no more likely to challenge the British secret state than they are to challenge the dominance of the City of London. Even so, after the May General Election this year both SIS and MI5 put material out into the media aimed at their new political ...

... . ending the City's dominance of British economic policy. These views were reflected in Labour leader Neil Kinnock's 1986 book Making Our Way. But after the election defeat of 1987 (the third) the Labour leadership abandoned any thought of challenging the economic status quo and began accommodating the perceived power and electoral popularity of a Thatcherised, privatised Britain.59 Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who had acquired safe Labour seats in the 1983 general election, were part of this shift. By the end of their first parliament in 1987 both had been noticed as rising stars and had been given shadow cabinet roles, Brown as number two to the late John Smith, who was shadowing the Department of Trade ...

... Liddle, whose role as a lobbyist while on the No 10 payroll was revealed in 1998 by Greg Palast (see Lobster 36 ), are very old friends of Peter Mandelson. Thomson and Liddle were big wheels in the formation of the Social Democratic Party in 1981 – Liddle even standing as a LibDem parliamentary candidate in 1992 before joining the Blair team after the death of John Smith two years later. Now working alongside Thomson in the upper reaches of the BBC is David Jordan, who has taken over the delicate role of chief political adviser from Anne Sloman, who has retired to Norfolk with a gong. Sloman will be remembered for sending the famous warning to BBC staff not ...

... institute has an umbrella organisation – wait for it-- the American Iranian Council (line-up includes directors of Enron, Chevron/Texaco, the President of Halliburton). They should sort out the problem. Lloyd's (Rio Tinto) prize-winning essay, 'Right and Left to Right and Wrong', reminisced about his days with the young Tony Blair expelling 'the militants' from the Hackney Labour Party. It also made great play of the massive shifts with the withdrawal of Clause Four: but how serious was the commitment to this? Here is Geoff Mulgan, the man then in charge of Labour's renationalisation plans, in 1991, quoted in the Commons: 'There will be no need ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 37) Sumer 1999 Last| Contents| Next Issue 37 This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair Hugo Young Macmillan, 1998, £20 I cannot stand Hugo Young. He is a long-winded, pompous arsehole whose columns in the Guardian are mostly a waste of paper and ink. But he has his uses, notably as a mouthpiece for the Foreign Office. In this book he has revealed in infinitely greater detail than before the way the British Foreign Office conspired- yes: conspired- to get Britain into the EEC/EC/EU. This is a book the like of which the Europhobes and skeptics can hardly ...